Monday, July 6, 2015

As if Lord Cromwell Wasn't Sufficient/I Will Never View a Victorian House the Same Way Again

According to a great many researchers, authors, and historians (Tim Pat Coogan, John Kelly, Chris Fogarty, Harolyn Enis - just to name a few), the Great Potato Famine of the 1840s in Ireland had little to do with a bad potato harvest (they grew more than potatoes in Ireland) and everything to do with the fact that the British government confiscated food at gunpoint in what was part of parcel of their overall goal of depopulating the country (genocide and ethnic cleansing, in other words). And if you think that I'm exaggerating here, try this bit of verbiage on for size; "Only 1,000,000 Irish are likely to die, and that would be enough to do much good." Nassau Senior, a chief economist for Queen Victoria.

A book that I want to pick up is Sean O'Callaghan's (not sure if he's the IRA fellow of the same name - I'm thinking no) "To Hell or Barbados". In it, he chronicles the ethnic cleansing of Cromwell and the fact that possibly as many as 130,000 Irish people were sold into slavery and shipped to the Caribbean; many of whom were worked to death. Yep, there's a lot of hypocrisy here.